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Chapter 10
Navigating the Locations
in Your Stories
In This Chapter
▶ Deciding on a location
▶ Imagining the setting in detail
▶ Creating your own worlds
Every story has to take place somewhere – even if it’s in the middle of
nowhere! The location is an essential ingredient, and a story set on a
remote island is sure to unfold differently to one played out in inner-city
London. The story also takes place at a certain point in time, and that time
becomes an intrinsic part of the story as well; a story set 200 years ago is
going to be very different to the same story taking place today.
In some stories the location is so important that it becomes like a character:
readers simply can’t imagine the events taking place anywhere else (think
of Graham Greene’s seedy portrayal of Brighton in Brighton Rock (1938),
the Yorkshire moors in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) or Gustave
Flaubert’s rural Normandy in his 1856 novel Madame Bovary). A story can’t
take place in a vacuum; without a strong sense of place, readers feel lost or
distanced from the narrative.
A book with a strong sense of place takes readers out of their own world
and into another reality. As I consider in this chapter, creating a sense of
place is all about description and the way that the setting affects the characters.
I discuss selecting a real location and inventing your own fantastical
one, and – whichever way you choose to go – how to make it come alive
through detail.